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  • Ruminations – 18mar2009 (21mar09 update)

    George Rebane

    HillarysResetButton The Clinton Reset Button show sure had an impact.  A week later the Russians escalated their standoff with the US by announcing a new military build up and signaling a harder line with Washington, in the process making our new Sec State look like a clown (more here). The Russians have now shoved that little device into a place where the sun don’t shine, which may explain Hillary’s stiffer gait of late.  Put together with the recent antics of Iran, North Korea, China, …, Russia’s response sure makes clear the changes we can expect with our new foreign policy.

    This little video of Rep Corrine Brown on the floor of the House was sent by a correspondent asking ‘how do these people get elected?’.  The direct and probably correct answer is that we send to Washington people who are reflections of ourselves – a frightening commentary indeed when we consider the makeup of that crowd.

    Can’t get the guns from us fast enough? – then go after the ammo.  The Sierra Bravos on Capitol Hill have a new tack on removing 2nd amendment rights – make ammo hard to get.  How about just doing it above board and passing a gun ban law that makes plain the Left’s agenda?  More here.

    When Help Does Harm.  DeadAidDead Aid by black African Dambisa Moyo is the latest entry on the growing pile of compelling evidence that Africa has not benefited from the thousands of aid programs.  It joins ex-World Bank economist William Easterly (The White Man’s Burden – Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest have done So Much Ill and So Little Good) and others in a condemning assessment of the harm we have been doing overseas with government and private sector projects.  I believe it is a reflection of the same effect we have had in our land with the launch of social engineering programs that destroyed minority families, and the ongoing corporate welfare programs that destroy the ability of businesses to compete in open markets.  Disagreeing with Dambisa Moyo’s analysis puts one in the awkward position of concluding that there is something seminal in the make-up of black societies that prevents them from forming governments beneficial to their people.  More on a closer-to-home example here.

    [21mar09 update]  Today the WSJ published a synopsis of Dead Aid in an article by Dambisa Moyo.  Here is the link for those who want to read the short form. 

    ThatcherQuote

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  • Ruminations – 17mar2009

    George Rebane

    Shamrock Happy Saint Paddy’s Day to all!  Kinda wish folks from Estonia also had enough of a presence in America to have an annual celebration of our ethnicity and contribution to the country.  But we are such a minority that if we were to be recognized, so would the folks from East Timor - and then where would we be?  Every day we’d have to pay homage to another foreign culture, leaving little time for our own.  Someone recently reminded me that we Americans don’t have a culture any more; at least not one that you’re supposed to celebrate.

    Everyone’s frothing about the $165M of AIG bonuses.  Seeping out bit by piece, it now turns out that our government, with the loyal MSM in tow, has been doing a big cover-up on the real AIG story – how they got into the mess, what they did there, and how the bail out is being conducted.  The Capitol Hill hooligans and their regulators have a lot to answer for since at least 2005, and now they’re wanting us to keep focused on the bonuses so we don’t accidentally look under the wrong rocks.  Good overview here.

    The full court press by the unions today on the country’s workplaces is cause for concern according to a retired executive from the US Postal Service.  He cites chapter and verse – ‘Going Postal with the Economy’ – how the USPS has been permanently done in by its employees’ union, and warns of initiatives like ‘card check’ (aka Employee Free Choice Act) that will ease the spread of the disease into other segments of American industry.  The basic game is the same, decouple reward from performance.  It doesn’t matter where it is played – private or public sector – the result is always the same, more money for minimal output.  Here the retired USPS executive writes, “If the Employee Free Choice Act becomes law the experience of the USPS will be magnified throughout the economy, creating a rigid labor market not unlike what is found in Europe.”  Don’t you love the way the ‘honorables’ in Washington name their handywork?  You can bet the ranch that if it includes ‘free choice’ in the name, it is designed to eliminate the same.

    H1Bhouses Here’s one that gets two birds with one stone.  Increase the H1-B visa quotas to attract more foreigners educated in the needed skills our kids now avoid, and ease their way into permanent residency if they purchase a home here.  A couple of capitalists, LeFrak and Shilling, detail the benefits here.  What do you think the chances are that the congressional clowns will actually make this happen?

    White House comment line – 202/456-1414; Sen Diane Feinstein – 202-224-3841; Sen Barbara Boxer – 202/224-3553. 

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  • There May Yet Be Hope

    George Rebane

    … and what skills will you have to offer for which someone will voluntarily pay?

    HiTechHouse Young people today are beginning to wake up to the benefits of learning high-tech skills no matter what their career plans may be.  This discovery has been made through a survey sponsored by IBM and reported on here.  The basic idea is that if you emerge tech-savvy from school, the world is open to you.

    Many of us techies experienced this in our careers that started decades ago and tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to motivate our kids and friends to consider it, especially if they were still undecided on their life’s work when it came time to make pro-tech vs tech-free course choices.  In the aggregate, they and our country have paid a price for kids proudly adopting the ‘I don’t do math’ attitude.  In the interval many notable people and good writers have tried to inform young people that high-tech skills not only let you choose rewarding careers but, more fundamentally, give you thinking tools that are useful over the broad landscape of human life.  With such a background, you can think thoughts that others without it cannot even imagine.

    Now there may be a sea change coming, and perhaps the current recession is yielding up a blessing for us all as the next generation faces up to the realities of job markets in a pre-Singularity world.  Mark Hanny, VP of IBM’s Academic Initiative, as reported in NetworkWorld –

    Hanny explains many companies today want "T-shaped employees," meaning those with a broad knowledge base that can be applied across the business, but also a deep understanding of their specific field, such as engineering or nursing. Such demands in the workforce partly drive universities to offer interdisciplinary courses among engineering, computer science and business schools, for instance.  "The key takeaway for IBM and our Academic Initiative is that now saying you have IT skills doesn't mean you are locked up in the data center or stuck in a server room.  IT is being embraced by students as a core competency across many professions and no longer considered a narrow, specialized skill set."

    For me and my peers it was an exhilarating experience to be qualified and wanted for what seemed to be a limitless host of jobs and careers as we graduated with our technical degrees (mine was in physics).  After we started work, most of us went back to grad school for more degrees, not only because it was profitable, but for the excitement of the new universes it opened for us.  Now after decades of our capable young getting educations in the humanities, law, and politically correct majors destined only for government jobs, today for some the pendulum may be swinging back so that Americans may continue to compete in world markets.

    For more clarification on this message, please see John Henry, the Steel Drivin' Man. 

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  • Our New Course is Declared (22mar09 update)

    George Rebane

    Obama could not spell it out more clearly than in his third book, this one just submitted to Congress and entitled ‘A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise. The President’s Budget and Fiscal Review’ (2.8MB pdf)  It is a declaration of class war on life as usual in these United States.  Team Obama correctly bets that his flock will not read the document, and if they do, they will not understand its implications. 

    In his own words on page five, The Man says, “While middle-class families have been playing by the rules, living up to their responsibilities as neighbors and citizens, those at the commanding heights of our economy have not.”  Translated – ‘You see those rich folks? they have too much, they got it by taking away your fair share, and we aim to get it and give it back to you.’  The rest of the 141-page document outlines how that process will be started to correct the “something wrong” about the government “allow(ing) the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few …”.  Chilling stuff last heard from a Lenin, Mao, Castro, Mugabe, … standing on the flatbed of truck surrounded by large crowds waving guns and pitchforks.

    GiniIndex For those who want to get a little deeper understanding of the burr under the socialists’ blanket, we have to look at something called the Gini Index (sometimes also erroneously called the Gini Coefficient).  The Gini Index is a simple yet compelling measure of how equally wealth or income is distributed in some group of people, for example, citizens of a country or participants in an economy.  The Gini Index (GI) per se is one of the favorite tools of the Left, including the United Nations, in arguing for the forcible redistribution of wealth among the world’s people.  I use ‘per se’ because by itself, the GI can imply a very misleading picture of the quality of life (QoL) in the covered populations simply because it ignores QoL in its make-up.  Nevertheless, attempting to reasonably discuss wealth distribution without some apprehension of the GI reduces one to just mouthing ideological slogans.

    Looking at the nearby figure (click to enlarge) is fundamental to understanding the GI.  The horizontal axis represents the fraction of people in the GI population, and it ranges from 0 to 1 or 0 to 100%, if you prefer.  The vertical axis represents the cumulative amount of income or cumulative amount of wealth with a similar range.  To metaphorically generate the GI, you line up all the population starting with the lowest income (we’ll use the income version for now) on the left, then the next lowest, and so on winding up with the person with the highest income at the right end (the 100% end) of the population axis.

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  • Ruminations – 11mar2009

    George Rebane

    Ending ‘Market-Based Government’ is a banner for Obama’s reform of government procurements from the private sector – especially in the defense sector.  The media elevated ‘outrages’ by service contractors like KBR and Blackstone in Iraq during the Bush years made a big impact on an electorate historically constrained.  Nobody remembers or has read about what went on during the nation’s real wars (WW2, Korea, and Vietnam), and, of course, the longest of them all – the Cold War.  Problems with government procuring things it needs have not gotten any better since George Washington had his troubles with the Continental Congress.  Government procurement people are sinecured bureaucrats pounded on mercilessly by politicians, end-users (e.g. military), and the contractors.  They are not involved in the excitement of development or the satisfaction of end-use, they never get credit for cutting a ‘good deal’ and are therefore experts at shedding blame for problems caused by their administrivia – they are the “bean counters”, despised by all.  It’s an ongoing bad situation and it won’t get any better no matter the grandstanding of the politician du jour.  We will still buy the $600 toilet seats, and a contracted security service mix-up will still cause the occasional politically embarrassing incident.  But to think that expanding government to provide some of these services ‘in-house’ is going to be more efficient or cheaper is just a lost lesson that has to be relearned at great expense.  (I was a DoD contractor for twenty years and have since stayed in touch with colleagues still in harness.)

    FastGrowthJobs

    Continuing to reject skilled workers.  The recent stimulus (here ‘SP787’) was not read by anybody and contains little poison pills that will make themselves known as this recession plays out.  One just discovered is a provision – Employ American Workers Act – which prevents an employer of highly skilled workers from importing them under the already stingy strictures of the H1-B visa program unless he can guarantee that he won’t lay off high skilled Americans in the interval.  In short, the government becomes the final arbiter of what skill sets and which individuals an employer in the daily grind of market competition should keep and could hire (more here and here).  RR readers are familiar with the brain-drain problems in our country’s wealth generating industries.  The graphic used in the last post on this may have seemed a little over-the-top, but perhaps re-evaluated in this new light … .

    On a more enlivening note, belief in God is now identified with brain areas “that have evolved most recently”.  So take heart all you religious knuckle-draggers out there who have been told how ante-deluvian your beliefs are; you are really displaying that your wetware (aka ‘meat servo’ for you techies) has the latest and greatest add-on, and it’s fully functional.  New Scientist reports that –

    National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke researchers found from fMRI brain scans that religious beliefs “light up” the areas that have evolved most recently, such as those involved in imagination, memory and “theory of mind” — the recognition that other people and living things can have their own thoughts and intentions.

    More here – ‘Theory of mind’ could help explain belief in God.

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  • Our Disastrous Brain Drain Continues

    George Rebane

    The Washington Post recently reported (‘They’re Taking Their Brains and Going Home’)  on one of the many unnecessary travesties sweeping our country.  While printing money and debating amnesty for illegal aliens who violate our borders and immigration laws, there is a valuable cohort of legal aliens who are going home in droves after being trained here, creating enormous value here, and being hassled by our government here.  The prestigious Association for Computing Machinery summarizes the situation this way –

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  • Nevada City Fog

    George Rebane

    CityHall What a bunch of unmitigated crap!  According to Nevada City mayor Barbara Coffman (reported in the 9mar09 Union), “It is council’s fiduciary responsibility to make the policy decisions concerning finance and to monitor the budget.  We can’t give this responsibility to anyone else.”  This patronizing pabulum is clearly intended to bamboozle the uncritical and/or under-educated segment of city voters.

    There is no issue with the soon-to-be-removed citizens’ oversight committee usurping the city’s “fiduciary responsibility”.  Witness the sorry history of city financial management, the city council has never been a responsible (or accountable) agency in looking after the city’s monies.  And now it appears intent on making sure it will avoid that burden in the future.

    Paying off Cathy Wilcox-Barnes for her recent dismissal as city clerk left a lot of rocks unturned around city hall.  I kinda wish Cathy would have had her day in court to sue the city.  That show would have been better than cable.

    The council now wants to rid itself of the meddlesome oversight committee so things can get back to normal, no matter the past character of that norm.  Ignoring the message of George Foster’s resignation as its elected City Treasurer only highlights the hubris still firmly entrenched in city hall.

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  • Net Access Nevada County (20apr2009 update)

    George Rebane

    Nancy In this day of internet and broadband, it is really frustrating to sit somewhere in the built-up areas of Nevada County and not be able to get online.  Last I looked this is the 21st century, and we all agree that more than less connectivity is better.  And the kind I am recommending is really the low hanging fruit that bypasses all the ongoing county efforts to get more antennas and towers and internet service providers up here into the mountains.  Don’t get me wrong, all that should still go on, but what I’m talking about here is wi-fi access for ourselves and visitors to our county as we’re out and about.

    I was at a couple of meetings at a local professional organization’s building this week.  But when I whipped out my iPhone and tried to go online, I saw three ‘locked’ or password protected networks, and there I sat fuming.  More of us go through this daily experience as we do our work and errands in Grass Valley, Nevada City, Truckee, Penn Valley, divers shopping centers and malls, etc.  Our county’s most visited areas are covered by private wi-fi nets, but almost all of them are locked. 

    It occurred to me that the solution to the problem is simple and inexpensive.  Namely, retailers, hotels, restaurants, government offices, etc already having internet could make their establishments more friendly and convenient by installing an open (password-less) network for anyone in range of their wi-fi router.  And adding another wi-fi router in a daisy chain between your ‘locked’ network router and the internet access point (e.g. modem) is duck soup, and costs about as much as a big bag of duck food.  My hat’s off to the few  places, like the Brunswick Safeway, that are already providing this kind service to the public.

    I think that the local chambers of commerce, ERC, downtown organizations, and even our local governments could get behind this and get the word out.  People would be naturally drawn to establishments that advertise that theirs is a ‘wi-fi hotspot’.  And it wouldn’t take too many people signing on until all of our built-up commercial areas are covered inside and out with open access wi-fi.

    I checked this out with my neighbor Tom Borman who’s a pro at this stuff, and he added that the $40-50 wi-fi router costs could be reduced further if they could be bought in quantity as part of a coordinated community-wide program.  I modestly offer a working name for this program – Net Access Nevada County or NANC (pronounced Nancy, and recognizing the Bushmiller graphic dates you).  Establishments offering NANC would display a nifty poster or sign near their entrances, and soon almost all of the county would be ‘hot’ and so advertised to attract tourists and brag about our quality of life.

    In any event, as a county resident I call upon our Supervisors and County Information Officer Steve Monaghan to take NANC under advisement.  This upgrade to county connectivity is just too valuable and easy to pass up.  (And Readers from more distant parts will recognize that this is a movable feast that can be set up with equal ease in your local communities.)

    [update] Re the comment by Russ Steele, I talked to Russ tonight and it seems that a couple of years or so ago Russ tried to push a similar idea.  Apparently it got stuck in some buerocrateze between local governments and internet service providers wanting exclusivity in the towns before they would come in, and then they would want to make it a controlled access subscriber system which would go completely against the open access concept of NANC.  Russ and I both feel that if NANC is implemented, then its benefit to locals, county visitors/tourists, and PR value as a ‘hot county’ would be enormous.  Russ also sent along a list ( download here ) he had compiled of the establishments that offered free and ‘semi’ free access thus corroborating the point that such services are already scattered around the county.  It’s probably dated, but it makes the point.  A hat tip to Russ has been duly registered.

    [20apr09 update] – Nevada County’s head of  all things IT just emailed me with the following information.  Implementing NANC should now be a cinch.

    From: Steve Monaghan [mailto:Steve.Monaghan@co.nevada.ca.us]
    Sent: Monday, April 20, 2009 4:04 PM
    To: rebane@
    Subject: GuestGate HotSpot Gateway

    There’s a product for everything…..
     
    $160.00  –  add a $35.00 wireless access point and your done.
    • Provides configuration-free guest access to the Internet
    • Protects your private network from guests
    • Initial setup performed by IT administrator using web-based user Interface
    • Guest protection through Layer 3 Client Isolation technology (patent pending)
    • No additional setup for new guests
    • Plug and Play experience for your guests
    • Lifetime Warranty

    http://assets.icintracom.com.s3.amazonaws.com/downloads/274/523240_datasheet.pdf
     
    http://www.intellinet-network.com/en-US/products/5316-guestgate-hotspot-gateway

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  • Nevada City Treasurer – RIP (Resigned in Peace)

    George Rebane

    GeorgeFoster George Foster, elected Nevada City Treasurer, resigned last night.  His surprise resignation should not have been a surprise to anyone on the city council paying attention to what George has been trying to accomplish in revamping what has passed for the city’s financial management. 

    The real surprises in the recent past have been discoveries of mysteriously unknown lapses in collecting for certain utilities, ‘spiking’ the wages of soon to retire city officials, and the magnitude of the unfunded liabilities the city faces.  The city’s operations have been a puzzle to all outsiders to whom there seemed to be a disconnect between the Treasurer and the Council in how the city budgets and spends its monies. 

    With the disbanding of the citizens financial oversight committee by the City Council, visibility into city finances now changes from murky to opaque.  That committee seemed to be the last counterweight to making the Treasurer’s job something beyond being a potted plant in city hall.  Nevada City has lost an experienced, motivated, and much needed public servant to help steer its way through the shoals of the current recession with a gaggle of captains manning the wheel. 

    The only ongoing surprise is that the county Grand Jury has not seen fit to invite George in for a chat, maybe now they’ll revisit that decision.

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  • Ruminations – 5mar2009

    George Rebane

    People in Washington state are considering making divers state funded commissions – e.g. Commission to Rehabilitate Cross-Eyed Returning Salmon 😉 – to re-justify their purpose, reason for existence, and therefore getting funded this year.  In happier times these do-nothing-but-impede outfits just got their annual stipend, and went about their busybody business.  Now someone thought they should start doing what heads-up businesses call zero-base budgeting.  Estimates say that should save the state several hundred million a year.  Obviously, California is not paying attention.

    For some decades now I have fostered the opinion that a career politician is a sleazebag politician until they demonstrate otherwise.  In short, we can’t go far wrong in the aggregate to brand them as such and treat them accordingly – guilty until proven innocent.  That almost all of them support ‘hold hostage legislation’ is one of the prime reasons for my sticking to this view.  These self-serving pilgrims continually concoct bills that combine needed single-issue government funding with all manner of pork, special interest addendums, and secret codicils.  And then they threaten to withhold their vote until their favorite add-on gets included.  Hence the eternal truth that one should not examine too closely how sausages and laws get made.  Well, the bastards (that used to be a dirty word before out-of-wedlock children became the norm) are at it again.  The bill to continue routine funding of government departments – the “omnibus funding bill” – has become so omni that everyone has piled something on so that the rest can purchase their vote.  I would like to see just one legislator say ‘Enough!’ and walk out.  If we can’t vote on the crap as standalone bills, then they shouldn’t be made into costly laws.  And that’s why professional politicians remain first and fundamentally sleazebags.

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